The boulevards of Paris are centrepieces of the city, drawing well-heeled Parisians and doe-eyed tourists alike. But despite the high brand shopping and stylish cafes which dominate these wide and picturesque streets today, they were originally created not with posh Parisians in mind, but with pissed off ones.

Throughout the 19th Century, revolution was in the air in France, and the capital city had been at the centre of the civil unrest which had seen the country transition between royalty, republic and empire six different times by 1870.

One of the most useful tools for these riotous Parisians was the barricade, an ad hoc wall made from the all the neighbourhood’s furniture. Historian Mark Traugott recorded 21 instances of barricades being used between 1795 and 1871. The 1830 revolution saw over 4,000 barricades put up across the city; in that of 1848’s Feburary Revolution, there were as many as 6,000.

By blocking off Paris’ notoriously narrow streets, such barricades prevented the government of the day’s soldiers restoring order/ crushing dissent (eliminate depending on political sympathies). Failure to deal with this unrest let it snowball and led to the toppling of rulers time and time again.

The rue du Jardinet on the Left Bank, demolished by Haussmann to make room for the Boulevard Saint Germain. Image: Charles Marville/Wikimedia commons.

So by the time Napoleon III declared himself emperor in 1852, he realised that something needed to be done, otherwise he would go the same way as his predecessor. He found the man to do it in Georges-Eugène Haussmann.

A self-styled baron, Haussmann made up for his lack of architectural knowledge with his enthusiasm for demolishing things. He referred to himself in his own notes as an “artist-demolitionist”: rarely visiting the neighbourhoods he was destroying, he preferred to abstractly remould the city from a comfortable desk.

In this way, Haussmann re-planned Paris, bulldzing wide new boulevards through the fabric of old Paris giving soldiers easy access into all corners of the city – and preventing the construction of effective barricades.

Haussman’s new streets are shown in red. Click to expand. Image: Dimitri Destugues/Wikipedia.

Haussman was particularly keen to do over neighbourhoods with dodgy reputations. Saint-Antoine, a suburb known for being restless and populated by those dangerous working classes so feared by Versailles – and one which had been at the heart of the 1789 revolution – had a shiny new boulevard cut straight through it.

Ancient roads such as Rue de Rempart, where Haussman himself had been caught in fighting in 1830, were demolished, to be replaced by swanky unbarricadeable boulevards like the Avenue de l'Opéra. No longer could any ne'er do wells throw their gran’s coffee table across a narrow street and overthrow the government.

Barricades were still used, most notably during the Paris Commune of 1871, but their strategic effectiveness was very much blunted. Instead they retained a symbolic value of resistance and revolution, which still captures imaginations today.

In his memoirs Haussman spoke with pride of erasing parts of Paris. Indeed he spoke about the peoples whose lives were destroyed in a way that would have made even a pre-revolution French aristocrat blush, describing them as “a floating mass of workers…. who are attracted only by impressions and the most deplorable suggestions”.

Despite this personal disdain, though, the ‘artist-demolitionist’ remoulded the city. It is thanks to him that most of the city no longer resembles the narrow and winding alleyways of the Marais district, the aristocratic area and one of the few untouched by Haussmann’s designs. It is thanks to him that people from around the world come to Paris to amble fondly along the boulevards unimpeded by barricades.

As anyone in the UK who has been near an internet connection today will no doubt know, there’s a petition on Parliament’s website doing the rounds. It rejects Theresa May’s claim – inevitably, and tediously, repeated again last night – that Brexit is the will of the people, and calls on the government to end the current crisis by revoking Article 50. At time of writing it’s had 1,068,554 signatures, but by the time you read this it will definitely have had quite a lot more.

It is depressingly unlikely to do what it sets out to do, of course: the Prime Minister is not in listening mode, and Leader of the House Andrea Leadsom has already been seen snarking that as soon as it gets 17.4m votes, the same number that voted Leave in 2016, the government will be sure to give it due care and attention.

So let’s not worry about whether or not the petition will be successful and instead look at some maps.

This one shows the proportion of voters in each constituency who have so far signed the petition: darker colours means higher percentages. The darkest constituencies tend to be smaller, because they’re urban areas with a higher population density.

And it’s clear the petition is most popular in, well, exactly the sort of constituencies that voted for Remain three years ago: Cambridge (5.1 per cent), Bristol West (5.6 per cent), Brighton Pavilion (5.7 per cent) and so on. Hilariously, Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North is also at 5.1 per cent, the highest in London, despite its MP clearly having remarkably little interest in revoking article 50.

By the same token, the sort of constituencies that aren’t signing this thing are – sit down, this may come as a shock – the sort of places that tended to vote Leave in 2016. Staying with the London area, the constituencies of the Essex fringe (Ilford South, Hornchurch & Upminster, Romford) are struggling to break 1 per cent, and some (Dagenham & Rainham) have yet to manage half that. You can see similar figures out west by Heathrow.

And you can see the same pattern in the rest of the country too: urban and university constituencies signing in droves, suburban and town ones not bothering. The only surprise here is that rural ones generally seem to be somewhere in between.

The blue bit means my mouse was hovering over that constituency when I did the screenshot, but I can’t be arsed to redo.

One odd exception to this pattern is the West Midlands, where even in the urban core nobody seems that bothered. No idea, frankly, but interesting, in its way:

Late last year another Brexit-based petition took off, this one in favour of No Deal. It’s still going, at time of writing, albeit only a third the size of the Revoke Article 50 one and growing much more slowly.

So how does that look on the map? Like this:

Unsurprisingly, it’s a bit of an inversion of the new one: No Deal is most popular in suburban and rural constituencies, while urban and university seats don’t much fancy it. You can see that most clearly by zooming in on London again:

Those outer east London constituencies in which people don’t want to revoke Article 50? They are, comparatively speaking, mad for No Deal Brexit.

The word “comparatively” is important here: far fewer people have signed the No Deal one, so even in those Brexit-y Essex fringe constituencies, the actual number of people signing it is pretty similar the number saying Revoke. But nonetheless, what these two maps suggest to me is that the new political geography revealed by the referendum is still largely with us.

In the 20 minutes it’s taken me to write this, the number of signatures on the Revoke Article 50 has risen to 1,088,822, by the way. Will of the people my arse.

We notice that you're using ad blocker. If we can't support the site on advertising revenue, CityMetric will go the way of, I dunno, the Aldwych branch of the Piccadilly line. Which, let's be honest, would suck.

That's the bad news. The good news is that, if you contribute now, you can support CityMetric's quality, independent journalism another way - and this message will disappear for the next 30 days.